Nature's new blogs portal: add your blog
Maxine Clarke
Wednesday, 05 November 2008 16:10 UTC
From Euan Adie:
We launched a new blogs portal on nature.com earlier this week. It’s part of a general overhaul of blogging at Nature Publishing Group which amongst other things involves link backs from articles to the blog posts writing about them (bloggers get traffic, our readers get conversation around papers – works for us both) and improving the blogging experience for users on Nature Network.
I’ll skip the PR blurb in favour of some good old fashion techie bullet points:
- Nature Blogs is a blogroll of good quality science blogs (quality is a relative term, but there’s no spam or pseudoscience and little press release regurgitation)
- To get onto the blogroll you need to submit your blog
- You can log in to the site with your Network or nature.com (Nature Network) username and password then claim any blogs that you own.
- The blogroll is moderated by the community (once you’ve submitted and claimed a blog you get to vote on submissions)
- To be included in link backs from articles you need to be on the blogroll
- It uses Scintilla to aggregate posts from all of the blogs on the blogroll, then clusters them into stories – groups of related posts.
- We’re trying out Twitter as an alternate view on the stories data – if you follow the NatureBlogs user then a couple of times a week it’ll point you to particularly interesting stories you might have missed. You can also find twittering bloggers by watching NatureBlogs’ following list.
- It uses Connotea’s WebCite web service to work out what links in posts are to scientific articles.
We’re just getting started and there’ll be more developments as other aspects of NPG’s blogging strategy come together.
The next release in a couple of weeks will focus on usability issues and bugs – we know there are a few! – and on the API. (Technical details at Euan’s Nascent post.) Euan is keen to hear any criticisms, bug reports and feature requests – as blog readers you are the target audience after all – so do feel free to email him on blogs@nature.com or direct message natureblogs on Twitter with your feedback!
Updated 05 November 2008 18:11 UTC
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So… what are the implications for network.nature and the weblogs there?
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Oh, I see—it’s a kind of aggregation thingy.
Having difficulty claiming mine, though.
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I was looking forward to this ever since Euan mentioned this at the Science Blogging meeting in London. Let’s put all our Network Network blogs on the blogroll.
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What is the A-Z list of blogs? The “top blogs” on the main page are the same as the recently added ones, which suggest that only a few where added, but in A-Z there are soooooo many blogs.
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I was surprised the NN blogs hadn’t already been added. We’re having to work to get on the system.
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But note that you have to be voted in before your blog is accepted. I don’t think I’m brave enough to risk it.
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It appears they have, Bob—although they’re not easy to find. Claiming them doesn’t work though. Euan is working on it.
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I have not found my NN blog yet on the site to try to claim it – but my Humans in Science one featured already and once I understood that the identifying tag had to be inserted into tags , I was all set.
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Euan is also going to include a category for Nature Network blogs in the right-hand “blogs by subject” navigation box – he’s making changes to the code all the time but the NPG IT department only does code releases at certain intervals – I think the next one is in a couple of weeks. (See last paragraph of post.)
It will take a while before the “recency” and other features begin to work, as there will be a lag while everyone claims their blogs and then bloggers generate the links for the site to track and index. It will gradually build up.
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PS, to see how to claim a blog, go to the “help” tag at the far left of the tabs across the main blogs page. There are very clear instructions there. Good luck!
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